Tag Archives: microsoft

I like to keep my user profile file separate from my system drive in case my hard drive crashes or I need to reinstall Windows. This used to be a tedious and difficult process until now. I found a good step-by-step tutorial that explains how to do it. You need to have some advanced knowledge of Windows 7 and it should be no problem for the average Power User, unless you are afraid of the Registry.

A couple years ago I started using T4 templates in my Visual Studio projects. They provided me with a quick and efficient way to generate source files (C# and SQL in my case) based on the application’s database schema. T4 is also extremely useful for generating code for ASP.NET MVC (more information below). The problem only problem is that Visual Studio 2010 by default applies no Intellisense or code coloring. This makes it difficult to edit resulting in a wall of code.

This problem was originally solved for me in Visual Studio 2008 in 2009 when I downloaded and eventually purchased the Clarius Visual T4 editor per recommendation by Microsoft. Clarius stopped developing their T4 Editor plug-in in late 2009 and there is no support for Visual Studio 2010. Last Winter the lack of development made me optimistic that T4 Intellisense would be in Visual Studio 2010. Usually canceling development by a plug-in vendor Clarius indicates that Microsoft is about to make them redundant. Unfortunately this was not the case and I was left without this handy feature in Visual Studio 2010. Fortunately I can across a post today on stackoverflow that offered a FREE solution from Tangible Engineering. I downloaded and installed this software today and Intellisense was back (on most things).

It appears Tangible Engineering (@tangibleeng) has adopted a crack-dealer business model like other plug-in vendors. The FREE version doesn’t support all of the C# language. It does provide enough though for developers to decide if they need to to pay 99.98 USD for the PRO edition. If you use T4 often it’s worth it, I just don’t know if I want to spend $100 again just to have the vendor flake out on the next version of Visual Studio. My hope is that the Visual Studio team bakes this feature into the next version.

Update – 8/26/2010

I appears that Clarius posted some news regarding a Visual Studio 2010 version shortly after this original post. Read about it over at the Visual T4 blog.